Talk:John Darling
Strips I have some of these strips -- I'll do some scans this weekend! -- Danny (talk) 20:07, August 27, 2010 (UTC) : Okay, I put up the strips! I'm glad that I was reminded of this -- it's a weird little bit of Muppet history that I happened to save, and for all I know these are the only surviving copies out in the wild. :) The 1979 strips are a little ripped up, but I cut them out of the newspaper when I was eight years old, so these things happen. : When JHVipond started this page, he said that the first strip's joke was that John thought he was going to interview Barbara Eden... I'm not sure about that. Reed says that the guest is "a certain well-known blond actress... who became a smash as a member of a TV program... and who just finished her first movie." Eden did have a hit movie in 1978, Harper Valley P.T.A., but it wasn't her first movie -- and I think the joke implies that the actress' movie was just coming out in the summer of 1979, when The Muppet Movie came out. : Is there another blond actress who would have been "the girl of my dreams" in summer 1979? I'm curious who that's referring to. I'm mostly looking to Andrew here. :) -- Danny (talk) 00:46, September 5, 2010 (UTC) ::The only one I could think of was Farrah Fawcett, but she also made several movies before 1979. Powers 00:51, September 5, 2010 (UTC) :::I'm digging into this. Definitely not Eden, who was a long-established TV and movie star by then. It actually could be Farrah Fawcett: fits the blonde bombshell idea, she was a current TV star, and she'd only had two fairly minor film roles earlier (Love Is a Funny Thing, a French movie which received limited US release in 1970, and the infamous Myra Breckenridge) which preceded her TV stardom. She had her first two leads, actual *star* roles, in Somebody Killed Her Husband (September 1978) and Sunburn (August 1979, co-starring Charles Grodin, Joan Collins, and Art Carney, so I suspect that's the movie in question). I should note that it also fits since he says she became a smash as a *member* of a TV program, which implies someone in an ensemble series who became a break-out but wasn't the main star, so that rules out Eden. Other possibles are easily ruled out; Suzanne Somers (Three's Company) had one feature film in 1979 which it seems never even saw release in the states, and Loretta Swit didn't have any film coming out at the time, and both would have paled in comparison to Fawcett as "the well-known blonde actress." -- Andrew Leal (talk) 00:58, September 5, 2010 (UTC) ::::How about Loni Anderson? WKRP was during this period. -- Ken (talk) 01:26, September 5, 2010 (UTC) :::::Good suggestion, but no movie credit to fit the time frame (few movie credits period, in fact, but she wouldn't get a billed role until Stroker Ace with Burt, and that was four years off). -- Andrew Leal (talk) 01:54, September 5, 2010 (UTC) ::::::Yay, I knew Andrew would figure it out. Farrah Fawcett would definitely be "the girl of my dreams" in 1979. Good call. -- Danny (talk) 05:42, September 6, 2010 (UTC)